Reading & Writing a Strong Sense of Place

plus a word about awards season

As a reader, one of the elements I look for in a book or story that excites me is a strong sense of place. I want to be anchored in the details that make that place worth writing about and how it influenced the writer or the characters involved. I want to be shown how this place is unique. I want to see the landscape, smell the scents, hear the sounds, both human and animal, of this place. What is the culture there? What do people eat, what music do they listen to, what do they do for fun, what are the collective and personal tragedies they’ve endured? And if there is local vernacular done well, all the better.

Shirley Wimbish Gray wrote an excellent piece on writing about place in Brevity recently.

I’ve gathered a few pieces that scratched my itch for place. There are Fiction and Nonfiction in this list and I hope in the whirlwind of this holiday season you find a quiet moment or two to read. If not, I hope you’ll come back to this list after the ferver is over.

An excerpt from How to Be UnMothered: A Trini Memoir by Camille U. Adams in The Common. (Trinidad)

“Seven years. From a child to an adult. From thirteen years old to twenty. Head of the household my mother left to me, her not-first daughter. The first daughter of my mother is her first child she deserted long ago in Grenada.”

“The House Is Getting Bigger” by Heain Joung in Do Not Submit. (South Korea)

“I thought the house where I was born would be there forever, it seemed big, strong and handsome to me as a young girl. It was set in a walled garden that was big enough to have a persimmon tree, a pear tree, a jujube tree, and a pine tree.”

“Good Friday” by Jane Hammons in Scrawl Place. (New Mexico)

“At the road leading to the Santuario people sell earrings tamales burritos stuffed Easter eggs santos retablos bultos. The museum of low-rider art beckons, but like these other pilgrims on foot and behind the wheel, I have a destination.”

“A Familiar Frottoir” by Shome Dasgupta also in Scrawl Place. (South Louisiana)

“Bisque slowly put a pistachio in her mouth, and Grandmother Violon rolled it around her tongue before chewing. There is life, Bisque thought, as he waited for her to finish. He put another one in her mouth. The light was broken as it came through the stained glass window, coming in from the other side of the room.”

“Looking Out” By Melissa Llanes Brownlee in Vestal Review. (Hawaii)

“It was his idea to hike down to the beach in Waimanu Valley with nothing but a bottle of vodka and a couple of cans of Spam, spawned from late night talk story at the drag races on the Queen K.”

Bob’s Kristin Lavransdatter By Teresa Tumminello Brader in Literary Mama. (New Orleans)

“It was impossible not to compare his class favorably to past religion classes, when the elderly voices of the nuns, some tinged with Irish accents, monotonously outlined Church history, as we apathetically took notes. Some of the tougher girls in Bob’s class acted indifferent, but even they couldn’t help but be drawn into the lively debates.”

The Caged Budgerigars by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar in Flash Fiction Online. (India)

“Wasim asked for winged pets on his birthday because Salman next door has a talking parrot. I inquired in the neighborhood and found the number of a local bird dealer. This young man with a long scar on his right cheek and a silver earring dangling from his left lobe brought me two birds—yellow-green as ripening mangoes.”

“A City’s Lagniappe History Of Old And New People” by Noah Banta in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. (New Orleans)

“Shining from these gates is a tailored marmalade-coloured suit wrapped around the body of a man, cajun and tall. He towers over the street’s early morning passerby and the faults in the sidewalk, of which there are many.”

“Everything is Just About the Same” by John Bovio in Reckon Review. (Amsterdam) *This one is gritty.

“Amsterdam lights the shadow. That dark part of your soul. The winds off the North Sea cut to the bone. Can eat you alive. This city rages like a destructive and unpredictable fire. The people who come to Amsterdam and lack the good sense to leave usually are sent home. Sometimes breathing.”

'The Incident' and Other New York City Subway Stories by Michael Gonzales in Crime Reads (New York City)

“Living in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem back in the 1970s, our main subway station was located on a 145th Street and Broadway, a few feet away from the McDonalds where Jay-Z used to wait for the Dominican drug dealers to deliver his kilos. That was where the #1 ran.”

Michael’s stories about life in NYC and 1970s & 80s culture are exciting and absorbing. I recommend anything and everything he writes in Crime Reads and elsewhere. I have loved cop and detective shows set in NYC since I was a teen (Kojak! Get Christie Love! Cagney and Lacey! Shaft! NYPD Blue!) so I particularly like his take on the genre. Thanks to Michael I finally watched The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) and now it’s in my top 10 favorite films. Maybe it’s because I came of age during the era he chronicles or maybe it’s because he’s a damn fine writer but I am really into his stuff.

Me in my Kojack tee circa 1976ish - Who loves ya, baby?

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Finally, it’s awards season in the literary community. Social Media is awash with announcements, congratulations, and virtual high-fives, as it should be. But I’d like to give a shout-out to writers who have never had a nomination for Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Wigleaf Top 50, Best of the Net, Best American Essay, or any of the other awards that I’m not aware of.

There are lots of writers who aren’t on social media and don’t have the exposure others enjoy because, life. Writers who are writing on their lunch breaks, in rush-hour traffic, after putting the kids to bed at night, before the kids get up in the morning, on bits of napkin, on back of grocery lists and bill envelopes, on post-it notes, or maybe only in their heads for now. There are writers writing in liminal spaces as noted in Amy Barnes’ insightful craft essay in Reckon Review.

Lots of writers aren’t in academia, don’t have degrees in anything or maybe in fields like healthcare support or general business, who went to a technical community college instead of an Ivy League university. There are writers who don’t belong to writing groups or attend workshops, who believe in the stories they create in their own heads. There are writers who are published sparingly because the submitting process takes time they don’t have or cost money they can’t give. There are writers who aren’t aware, or maybe only peripherally aware, of literary awards. The first time I was nominated, back in the day, I had to Google the Pushcart Prize. I’d never heard of it.

I want to celebrate the writers whose own life stories, and their made-up ones too, beat anything written by a Booker Prize winner. Keep writing, keep living, hang in there. You are seen. You have people who are like you that read your work and think you are the bomb. Believe it.